Refuge on the Mediterranean Sea.

In 1933, the Mediterranean world emerged as one of the most significant sites of refuge for Jewish and oppositional academics fleeing from National Socialist persecution. As a result of the »Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service« enacted in 1933, numerous academics were caught up in the maelstrom of Nazi repression. A triad subsequently emerged abroad that was dedicated to the global relocation of fleeing researchers. It consisted of: 1) aid organizations such as the »Emergency Association of German Academics Abroad,« 2) key figures such as Albert Einstein, Max Born, and Salo W. Baron, and 3) universities that recommended, recruited, and disseminated threatened or exiled academics to research institutions around the world. Turkey became an important host country as well as a hub for the transit of threatened and exiled academics heading to Palestine and Egypt. 

The focus of this project seminar lies on the eastern Mediterranean world as a site of refuge, of (academic) solidarity, and of humanitarian aid. On the basis of archival sources and biographical documents, it will identify transnational and local actors involved in refugee aid, trace individual paths into exile on a case study basis, and reconstruct the structure, organization, and administration of self-aid. This research will culminate in a staged reading to be performed in Leipzig in the summer of 2026. As a result, participation in the second part of the seminar in the Summer Semester of 2026 is desirable, but not a necessary precondition for participation in the first part.

Literature: Sinja Clavadetscher et al., Mapping Forced Academic Migration, in: Gerben Zaagsma et al. (Hg.), Jewish Studies in the Digital Age (Studies in Digital History and Hermeneutics, Bd. 5), Berlin 2022, 107–123; Michael Grüttner, The Expulsion of Academic Teaching Staff from German Universities, 1933–45, in: Journal of Contemporary History 57/3 (2022), 513–533; Corry Guttstadt, Die Türkei, die Juden und der Holocaust, Berlin, Hamburg 2008; Isabella Löhr, Solidarity and the Academic Community: The Support Networks for Refugee Scholars in the 1930s, in: Journal of Modern European History 12/2, Ideas, Practices and Histories of Humanitarianism (2014), 231–246.

Open for senior students: no